Gallery

Gigi Sudbury

Conversation and poetry reading with Gigi and Sophie at 3pm on Saturday 22 July. Please contact the gallery to reserve a place.

Gigi Sudbury's paintings focus on the moment we allow a synthesis of intuition and experience to take hold. In the lone figure she recognises an act of defiance, the shedding of limitations and the move into a moment outside our hare-brain lives. Here a bird perches close, moonlight catches a reflection, flesh becomes transparent, shadows becomes solid. Her paintings are the start of an adventure when time ticks by without measure.

Sudbury paints mountain tops, rivers, skyscrapers, a father and angels, the moment between day and night. She uses fragments of words or letters to mark our desire to speak, but words aren't always enough. She learnt from Piero, Chagall and DuBuffet that painted feelings are different.

About the Joint exhibition with Sophie Herxheimer:

While working towards this exhibition Sophie and I have exchanged images and words by text and email. Her poetry and images have been a source of great pleasure and inspiration. For example, by looking at her figures I have painted my own in a loose response to what hers might be saying. Some of her poetry has made me look again at those things so close and familiar that I had ceased to look. The dialogue stays in the process and is not eminent the final image – the exchange feels like a giving hand held out across a gap but with no obligation to take it.

Sophie has the knack of honing a complex thought into a distilled image with a flowing black line of paint or a few poignant words. Her warmth, enquiring energy and humour mean that she can render even the smallest detail magnificent!
In this collection Sudbury alludes to today's digital revolution moving beyond our ability to answer the ethical questions it raises. She explores our technology driven world with the age-old discipline of mark-making. Much from our human history holds us together but while cultural lore adapts with the times it also prolongs ideas that are false or extraneous. Here she asks where and what we will become: half human, half computer, a being of a once fairy-tale future?

Sudbury has exhibited widely including at Leighton House Museum, The Barbican, South Bank, The Royal Overseas League and England & co. A ‘Stations of the Cross’, commissioned by Richard Davey for Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery and supported by the Arts Council, hung in St Edmunds Church, Southwold. She won the Alternative Turner Prize in 2002.